originally published 8/25/2017 on the Hashrocket TIL blog

Life is too short to have Homebrew problems. Run these commands to keep your brews bubbly.

Checks your system to make sure that future installs go smoothly:

brew doctor

Upgrades Homebrew to the latest version:

brew update

Gets a list of what packages are outdated:

brew outdated

Looks through your installed packages and deletes any old versions that may still be hanging around:

brew cleanup

You could alternatively add the --dry-run flag to cleanup to see all the outdated packages that would be removed.

Deletes old symlinks:

brew prune

Updates packages to the latest version:

brew upgrade

You can add the --cleanup flag to delete older versions of the packages you are updating.

Photo by Robert Wiedemann on Unsplash